by Geo Maher
They weren’t the only ones. Similar self-managed security collectives sprang up in occupied parks across the city, filling the void left where the police withdrew or were unwanted, and other self-managed spaces like the Sheraton hotel, which volunteers repurposed to house local homeless residents, formed part of a growing network of police-free zones. Amid the rioting and looting that exploded across the city after George Floyd’s murder, neighbors across Minneapolis got together to keep one another safe without the police. After a Native youth center was burned down, the local American Indian Movement established unarmed guardian patrols to protect community spaces and dissuade looters—sometimes calling their parents, but not the cops.11 In some neighborhoods, rival gangs united and multiracial coalitions emerged spontaneously, squaring off against looters but also against armed white supremacists: in the words of one impromptu patrol organizer, “There’s whites, Mexicans, blacks, Somalians, Africans, everybody’s out and everybody’s doing their part. The rest of the community that are not on the front lines are leaving sandwiches and cookies and coffee. They’re coming out saying thank you for keeping us safe.”12 Despite their role in defending the rebellions, however, these and all forms of neighborhood watch run the perennial risk of becoming the police, or worse.
This sudden surge in practical abolitionism was able to draw upon the long-standing work of local organizations like MPD150. Conceived in anticipation of the 150th anniversary of the Minneapolis Police Department in 2017, MPD150—like many abolitionist groups—sets out from the urgent task of imagining an alternative future. The group asks community members to “imagine that you were asked to help create stability in a newly-founded city. How would you try to solve the problems that your friends and neighbors encountered? How would you respond to crisis and violence? Would your first choice be an unaccountable army with a history of oppression and violence patrolling your neighborhood around the clock?” The group’s vision for a “police-free future” looks radically different—and far more concrete—than the stalled city council proposal, and it aims above all to divert funding toward prevention rather than enforcement.13 For MPD150, abolition looks like the Minneapolis Group Violence Intervention program, which de-escalates community conflict without involving the police. And it looks like fighting gender-based violence before it happens with fully funded and consent-based sex education in schools, and shifting school police budgets toward counselors and restorative justice workshops instead.
For MPD150, it also means raising awareness about what individuals and communities can do to make the police obsolete through simple “action ideas.” These include small, concrete measures that neighbors can take themselves: avoid calling the police; if you must, go to the local precinct rather than calling them, to avoid inviting police encounters in the neighborhood; make a list of alternative services to call; get trained in de-escalation and restorative justice; and when someone has a mental health crisis, center their own needs and safety. Above all, MPD150 urges people to connect with neighbors all the time, to establish real community bonds, and to “dream bigger,” always remembering that “there was a time before police, and there will be a time after.”14 While such small steps may not seem to measure up to the task of abolition, especially in the face of one of the best-funded and most-developed repressive apparatuses in human history, they nevertheless point toward broader horizons while supporting and building community alternatives.
Funding prevention will be expensive, MPD150 admits, but cities nationwide are already paying billions on the back end in the form of bloated police budgets, millions in police brutality settlements annually, and billions more toward mass incarceration. There’s plenty of money to redistribute to prevention, and while this won’t immediately eliminate all societal violence, MPD150 notes that the billions we currently spend on policing and prisons haven’t done so either. The new world without police won’t be perfect, but we need to admit to ourselves just “how imperfect the current world is,” and we need to wager on radical change:
All of the uncertainty ahead of us is still a better choice than the status quo. The status quo is a Black man calling out for his mother as a police officer kneels on his neck. The status quo is a seemingly never-ending list of names, hashtags, and lives cut short—not just by police violence, but by the ongoing violence of a system that cages millions of people and tears apart families. The status quo is the ongoing harassment and intimidation of communities going about their daily lives and simply existing. That’s the work ahead of us. A police-free future isn’t something that just happens to us; it’s something we build, together.15
The strongest antidote to the police, and to the violence that they don’t prevent—because it justifies their existence—is community, and when it comes to community alternatives to the police, we have far more options than many realize.
These alternatives begin to emerge when we choose to call friends, family, and neighbors instead of the cops, and build outward in concentric circles. On the level of the block and the neighborhood as a whole, this means developing deeper relationships, overcoming isolation, and checking in on our neighbors more often. It means making runs to the grocery store and making sure older and disabled neighbors have what they need. More ambitiously still, it could look like going door to door to establish a neighborhood group chat, putting in the work necessary to make sure everyone is enrolled and feels welcome to message the community with concerns. When there is a conflict among family members or between neighbors, this broader fabric can provide a critical alternative to bringing in the armed guardians of the state, because community members have more of a stake than the cops do in treating others like they matter.
This is not easy work. For years, I worked with organizers in West Philadelphia to establish just these kinds of networks. We held people’s courts on street corners where local community members could step up to the mic and describe their experiences with the police. We established temporary “No Cop Zones” to broaden people’s horizons and invite them to think about what a world without police might look like in the longer term. And, building on strategies like Copwatch, which observes and documents police activity, we sought to develop local rapid-response and self-defense networks that would allow the community to swarm the police, preventing brutality while also laying the groundwork for a true alternative that neighbors would be able to call upon for protection or to de-escalate and resolve local disputes. This work is almost always long and slow—although as Minneapolis shows, sometimes when the moment is ripe, you can get more than a thousand neighbors involved much more quickly. This time-intensive spadework is the price of building real community, however, and it’s infinitely cheaper in economic and social terms than the devastation wrought by policing.
As historian Garrett Felber has written, “The struggle to abolish the police is not new,” and US history—Black history in particular—is rich with community alternatives to the police.16 More than a century ago, in 1919, workers in Seattle declared a general strike and shut the city down. While striking workers set themselves to the task of providing supply networks to meet the basic needs of the population, they also established security patrols composed of progressive veterans of the First World War “to preserve law and order without the use of force.” “No volunteer will have any police power,” they stressed, “or be allowed to carry weapons of any sort, but to use persuasion only.”17 As strikers displaced the government, in other words, they provided organized alternatives that prevented violence both within communities and from the police. Contrast this to the Boston police strike of the same year: police sought to stoke chaos and, absent strong community alternatives, they were successful—albeit ultimately to their own detriment.
It’s no surprise that the most ambitious alternatives to the police have emerged historically from those communities where the cops offer the least protection while causing the most harm. This has been particularly true of Black struggles in the United States, past and present
, in which the theory and practice of self-defense has always played a crucial role. Under the overt white supremacy of Jim Crow, spontaneous self-defense against white terrorism by police and vigilantes was a constant presence. As Robin D.G. Kelley has shown, organizations like the Sharecroppers’ Union, backed by the Communist Party, embraced armed self-defense in the 1930s.18 In the 1950s, Robert F. Williams, president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), realized that armed self-defense was the only effective protection against Klan violence, and began to organize Black rifle clubs in response.19 Williams would be a major influence not only on the Black Panther Party, but also on the largest Black self-defense organization in US history: the Deacons for Defense and Justice, boasting fifty chapters across the South that defended Black neighborhoods while de-escalating community conflicts.20
In the words of Mississippi organizer Fannie Lou Hamer, “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom, and the first cracker even looks like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch, won’t write his mama again.” In the long struggle for Black freedom, self-defense has always gone hand in hand with community building. The community needed to be safe from external threats before its internal bonds could be strengthened, which is why the Panthers described their community service programs—from children’s breakfast clubs to safe escorts for older community members—as “survival pending revolution.” These were, moreover, social and economic alternatives that actually paved the way for that revolution by helping people see beyond the status quo. These kinds of alternative initiatives, prefiguring a new world controlled by poor communities themselves, proliferated across organizations like the Young Lords, Brown Berets, Red Guards, American Indian Movement, and Young Patriots—all of which joined the Panthers in a broad “Rainbow Coalition.”
After the Black Panther party was decapitated as part of the US government’s global counterinsurgency campaign, self-defense persisted nevertheless. Street gangs like the Bloods and Crips first emerged to protect Black communities from the informal segregationist violence of white gangs like the “Spook Hunters.”21 Black street gangs, what Mike Davis called the “bastard offspring” of the Black Panthers, were gradually and intentionally depoliticized, reduced to bloody retribution in communities for which the only alternative to unemployment and poverty was the drug trade. However, their original function was never fully eradicated. During the 1992 riots following the acquittal of the cops who brutally beat Rodney King, the Bloods and Crips signed a historic ceasefire, teaming up against the police and releasing a community reconstruction plan under the heading “Give us the hammer and the nails, we will rebuild the city.”
The plan reads like a wish list for preventative abolitionist reforms: rebuilding infrastructure, fully funding public education and health care, and revitalizating recreational facilities and public spaces by empowering local residents to do the work themselves. Of course, the proposal also involved the transformation of policing through the deployment of trained teams of “buddies,” unarmed local community members.22 But the Los Angeles Police Department had no interest in rebuilding poor communities of color. They moved swiftly to sabotage the gang truce, including by picking up members of rival crews and dropping them off deep in enemy territory. In the end, the strategy worked, and the hopes of a city free of gang violence faded.
—
Alternatives to the police have been flourishing in recent years. On every level that policing fails—from community safety to mental health care to sexual and gendered violence—grassroots community organizations already have a hard-won track record of success, doing with fewer resources, and a far less destructive impact on poor neighborhoods, what the state and the police can’t or don’t want to. Although some restorative and non-carceral alternatives to the police and prisons have used government and nonprofit support to expand their scope, the price has often been high: the cooptation of grassroots movements and the watering-down of the alternatives they provide to policing and the state.
In 1972, residents of West Philadelphia developed a network of block associations under the umbrella of the Citizen’s Local Alliance for a Safer Philadelphia (CLASP). Their goal was to make communities safer without the police through participatory patrols staffed by neighbors armed only with flashlights and air horns. The result by 1976 was 600 organized blocks and a 75 percent reduction in crime.23 The Achilles’ heel of all neighborhood watch organizations, however, is that in the name of security they often reproduce the surveillance and inequality of the world around them. In richer and whiter areas, such organizations are adjuncts of the police, surveilling segregated wealthy neighborhoods to keep the rabble out. In Philadelphia, for example, some block captains functioned as self-appointed deputies of racist leaders like Frank Rizzo, mobilizing and transporting white voters to the polls. Even in poorer neighborhoods, street patrols can reinforce inequality by targeting the poorest of the poor, homeless people, and drug users for scrutiny and ostracism. Groups like New York City’s Guardian Angels are essentially police by another name, as they make demonstrably clear every time they scuffle with protesters. And lest we forget, George Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch captain.
At their best, however, democratic and inclusive community organizations that are independent of the city, the police, and the wealthy can help to protect communities without reinforcing inequality. In Chicago, organizations like MASK (Mothers/Men against Senseless Killings) are confronting violence through a constant neighborhood presence that helps build community and intervene before violent conflicts arise. After a young mother was killed in 2015, MASK symbolically took over the corner “to simply hang out on the block, cook food, and emanate love. Our presence was felt. People began to notice neighbors were watching out for each other, and it was contagious.”24 The neighborhood where MASK operates saw homicides and shootings decline at twice the rate of Chicago as a whole, reaching historically low levels in 2017.25 This contagious abolition has spread to half a dozen other cities, but the work remains difficult and dangerous: in 2019, two MASK mothers were killed while on a patrol. A year later, MASK founder Tamar Manasseh was so worried about violence at a local funeral that she even warned the police. Despite a police presence, fifteen were injured in a shootout. For Manasseh, these and other tragedies simply drove home the basic reality: “They still let this happen … If the police won’t protect us, then what?”26 While Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot was elected on the promise to shift away from a reliance on the police, the $11.5 million she has dedicated to community intervention organizations like MASK represents less than 1 percent of a staggering $1.7 billion police budget.27
Mental health crisis intervention hotlines exist nationwide, but because most people continue to call 911 in an emergency, 911 diversion to community alternatives is crucial. Created in Eugene, Oregon, more than three decades ago, the CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets) model sends out two-person teams—one first responder and one crisis worker trained in mental health care—to de-escalate crises and connect people to the support they need. With an operating budget of scarcely 2 percent of the local police budget, CAHOOTS responds to nearly 20 percent of all emergency calls. The impact has been undeniable: in 2019, CAHOOTS received 24,000 calls, and only 150 of those calls resulted in police presence—saving millions of dollars and countless lives annually.28 Cities nationwide are currently weighing the potential of the CAHOOTS model, and organizations like the Anti Police-Terror Project in Oakland have established similar hotlines for non-police response to mental health emergencies.29
Grassroots alternatives have been particularly important for confronting sexual violence. This is no surprise, given how little the state does to prevent sexual assault—and given how many police are themselves perpetrators. Rape crisis centers first emerged in the early 1970s as a community alternative in the face of state indifference, in which “women were taking care of women instead of dependin
g on the patriarchal state,” alongside other grassroots organizations like Bay Area Women against Rape and Women Organized against Rape in Philadelphia.30 While public and nonprofit funding has seen rape crisis centers become more widespread, the institutionalization of these efforts has also taken the edge off their radicalism. Sex workers, moreover, unable to count on protection from a system of policing that criminalizes them as police sexually extort and assault them, have also developed their own alternatives in the form of collective organizations and safe spaces. Others have established what are known as bad date lines, publicly naming abusive or dangerous clients like the Black Panther Party once named abusive police.31 Cities in the United States and across Canada have embraced bad date lines, which are now sometimes operated in conjunction with the police.
On the back end, organizations like the Communities against Rape and Abuse do the difficult work of restorative justice in the aftermath of gendered, domestic, and partner violence, providing transformative alternatives to policing and incarceration. CARA was formed after one of the first rape crisis centers in the country, Seattle Rape Relief, which had by then morphed into an institutionalized nonprofit, was shuttered by its board of directors. CARA sought to remain faithful to the original grassroots mission of much anti-violence work by shifting away from crisis intervention and embracing a community organizing model with a longer view, rooted specifically in poor neighborhoods of color.32 CARA provides guidelines for community-based accountability that includes survivors, perpetrators, and the broader community. By equipping people with the skills necessary to pursue accountability, it rejects the idea that sexual assault can be dealt with only by trained professionals or police.33